


Dust Bowl Dance

by feardubh



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Farm/Ranch, Angels, Death penalty, Dust Bowl, Dust Bowl Dance, F/M, Gen, Great Depression, Inspired by Music, Murder, Murder Row, Oklahoma, mumford and sons
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-14
Updated: 2013-03-14
Packaged: 2017-12-05 07:28:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/720419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feardubh/pseuds/feardubh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam Winchester is a young boy on a farm in Oklahoma. He grows up surrounded by the poverty farmers face in the late nineteen twenties and early Great Depression.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dust Bowl Dance

_The young man stands on the edge of his porch_  
 _The days were short and the father was gone_  
 _There was no one in the town and no one in the field_  
 _This dusty barren land had given all it could yield_

 

I was born on May 2nd of the year 1919 under the name Sam Winchester. My father, John Winchester, married my mother Mary eight years before I was delivered, and I have been told that they were one of those couples that just seem to fit perfectly. I wouldn’t know it, though—she died before I was old enough to remember her. As a child, I recall asking Dad about our last name after he bought a Winchester model 1892 rifle from one of our neighbors just after the company phased them out. He told me that we were probably related to the founder, a man named Oliver Winchester, but he didn’t know for sure. The next day at school I excitedly went and told my best friend Sammy Colt that I was named after a gun too, and before the day was over I made sure the whole school, a whopping twenty three children, knew it too.

Sammy and I had a lot of fun together as kids. Even though our little town was small, just a cluster of buildings build around the center of a couple dozen farms in a middle-of-nowhere spit of land in Oklahoma, there were enough kids to find a decent group of playmates. Sammy was my closest pal, but there were a few others; Jessica Milton, Meg Mansfield, Michael Novak, and Adam Smith. There were others in town too, like Jessica’s sister Anna and the son of our only African American family Urial.

We grew up in a little yellow house on a farm that was almost four miles from the various shops and stores that made up the town itself. Ellen Harvelle, the mother of our friend Jo, was a motherly widow who ran the general store and sometimes gave us lollipops. The mayor was Michael’s father, and he may have had a first name, but as far as I knew it was Mister. The Miltons drove mail from the big city once a week because we had no post office, and the Manfields worked in the bar. Bobby Singer, a friend of Dad, was the town’s doctor. Almost everyone else farmed like we did.

Despite these playmates my father told me once that when I was a really little kid I was almost always with my brother. He was six years my senior and he kept me in line when Dad came home in the evenings too tired from trying to coax the fields to give us some decent crops to even begin to think chasing a kid around the house. Our mother died while giving birth to me and that left Dean in charge when Dad went out to work in the mornings. Dad would wake up before the sun rose over the hills and eat his breakfast, and when Dean would wander out, sleepy eyed and looking for his share of eggs and mash, he would take him by the shoulders. “You look out for your brother, you hear?” he would command sternly. “You boys stay out of trouble, and make sure you clear out the henhouse by noon.” Dean would nod soberly and draw himself up like a stiff little toy soldier.

He did take good care of me until I got old enough to fend for myself. Under his watchful eye I was fed three full meals and tucked in at night. Countless scraped and cuts were bandaged by his quick, callused fingers and once when I caught a nasty strain of scarlet fever he walked seven miles in the rain to get medicine from Ellen. He paid for it with his own meager pocket money, which was saying something back then as the newly developed antibiotics were expensive, and our allowance was small.

At the time I resented him a little bit for always being so bossy and controlling, but later I grew to realize that Dean had been far kinder to me than my father would have been. See, Dad was nice, and he meant well, but he worked a lot and most nights he preferred the thought of a bottle to the thought of going home to a house empty save for two scrawny boys. He missed Mary.

When I was seven Dean gradually decided that I was mature enough to come into town with him every few days and run around with the other kids, and I think he enjoyed the relief of not being cooped up with his little brother. That was also the year I started school.

I did a lot better in school than Dean even though he was older and pretty bright. He lacked conviction, I think, whereas I was honestly hungry to learn things. I understood rather quickly that even at the age of thirteen my big brother had established a bad boy reputation for himself, and it didn’t help that he spent most of his time with Benny. Benny was one of those kids that almost nobody liked because he wasn’t part of the group, or his family hadn’t been here long. Dad had moved us from somewhere north before Dean was born and none of us had picked up the comforting Okie twang, but Benny had an accent so foreign that he got picked on a lot when he tried to talk to people. His voice was low and gentle, drawling with an accent from south Louisiana that made him clip his consonants and stretch his vowels lazily. Though he was intelligent and soft spoken, his family was a bit estranged to say the least—word was his father moved to our little town to escape persecution after he went down with someone’s daughter despite the fact that she was young and he had a wife. I wouldn’t know. Benny didn’t like questions about his folks so I didn’t ask. Besides, he was Dean’s best friend, like my Sammy, and I didn’t want to piss either of them off.

We made a pretty decent group, my brother and I, when we had our right hand men and a few others. What had been called the Roarin’ Twenties by some hadn’t really touched farmers the way it had others; we struggled. All of us did. But the thing is, when people struggle together against the same thing, it helps draw them together sometimes and we were a good example of that. Our families struggled together, and so did we. That isn’t to say that we never met any trouble amongst ourselves, because kids always fight. Benny was bullied, as was Uriel and even Dean. They were alienated for being different and sometimes had to fight tooth and nail to stay in the group.

But when we all got along, things were good. We tore through the streets of town howling like the insane, playing war and cops and robbers. In almost every game we split into two unchanging groups; Dean, Benny, Jessica, Michael, Sammy, Adam, and I pit ourselves against Zachariah, Anna, Jo, Meg, Uriel, Ralphie, and Luke again and again. Victories were a wondrous event that caused us to parade around the general store in the center of town, defeats a thing of loud dramatic sorrow, hanging heads, and feet that dragged as we slunk home to nurse our bruises. Other times we worked as a whole and harassed the horses tied outside the store or stole loaves of fresh bread from the back steps of the bakery. We were rough and rowdy hooligans that ran wild, and it was good.

The best part was we had an even better reason to ally ourselves than pranking the grownups. There was another town about our size a few miles to the west called Sasak and it hosted its own slew of rug rats. We believed that we were the better, stronger, faster, smarter group of children and they thought just the opposite so every once in a while we would all go and race to Sasak to cause mayhem. They seemed to anticipate the day we would come, for at every attack we would find them lined up waiting for us, armed with sticks and rocks and mud and rotten fruit. We knew the days they would try to raid us as well, and we’d hide out behind the bar and ambush them in the square with our own weaponry. It was an unspoken and perhaps unconscious skill every child is inherently born with; the ability to look at the sky and say “Yes, I think today will be the day. Today will do just fine.”

I remember one day we all got bruised up pretty bad—it may have been the day Dad finally told us to knock it off with Sasak’s kids. We charged the town with homemade slingshots we’d carefully prepared weeks before and the Sasak children we ready with their own various clubs and stones. Our antics began as they usually did; groups breaking off to chaise each other, small tussles in the fine dust. Most of us expected things to go along as they normally did, but a few of the Sasak kids were more serious than we’d imagined.

Five minutes into the fight I noticed that the grunts and shrieks of play fighting had turned into the pained cries of someone in need. I think Dean noticed at about the same time; I saw his head lift, and he gazed about the square before his eyes locked with mine. We both dropped the kids we were wailing on—I had tackled a small girl to the ground, he had his fists in the front of a guy’s shirt—and rushed off in the direction of the sounds. It was Uriel and three or four bigger kids had shoved him against one wall, where he slumped into the dirt with a dazed expression.

“I said what you doing in town, nigger?” the lead boy yelled, slamming his foot into Uriel’s gut. I was frightened, and Dean’s hands were clenched. He kicked him again and repeated the question. Uriel’s only response was to spit a mouthful of blood at him. As scared as I was, I had to admire his bravery.

One of the leader’s friends stepped up and sent a series of pounding kicks to his chest before Dean decided to come to his aide. As he leapt onto the back of the leader and wound his arms around the larger boy’s neck, I tussled with one of his pals. We managed to get in a few his before the other two started on us, and from there it wasn’t very clear if we would make it out okay. I had one kid twice my weight sitting on my chest, his scrawny fists beating into my face, and I heard Dean grunt as someone landed a blow, and then he was down next to me trying to keep his face from being kicked in. Uriel was dragging himself away in the dirt. Benny saved the three of us, bless him—he came tearing through the fight with Sammy and Meg.

We were bloody and angry, supporting swollen lips and bad attitudes then. After the rest rounded up we went home, and it seemed most of them had missed the fight as they pestered us nonstop about it the entire walk home. Dean was reserved, annoyed that he’d been beaten. Even at odds of three to one he still disliked being the loser of a fight. He had a shiner coming up, a purplish black bruise rising around one eye, and he paused often to cough blood up into the dust. I came off only slightly better, and Uriel had a profound limp.

Dad was out in the fields that day and he would have been besides himself with fury if he’d known we were fighting, so we went to Ellen in the general store. She patched us up.

“Why’d they pick him, El?” I asked as she wiped at my face with a sharp smelling liquid. It stung in the places my skin had split.

“Sweet, down here people often dislike people by how they look,” she explained. “It’s called racism. Have you learned about slaves yet? And the civil war?”

I nodded.

“Some white people think they’re better than black people because black people were slaves and they have different skin.” Ellen told me.

“But Uriel’s no worse than the rest of us,” I replied honestly. “He’s a lot faster than me—and stronger than half of the kids in town.”

She gave me a sad look and murmured “You’re still small enough to see past it. When you’re older you’ll understand.”

Of course, Dad could see in the dark bruises we carried that we’d gotten into a fight, and he was pissed when he saw us. That night he only spoke to give us a very loud, very stern lecture about duty and foolishness and fighting with Sasak, and I think that was the last time we went over to our sister town. It wasn’t our last experience with discrimination, though. From that day I began to notice how some of the adults looked at Uriel and his family. The sideline glances of distrust, the curt answers, and most of all, the tones of their voices showed a deep alienation. They spoke to the family in the singsong voice a parent uses with a stubborn child, a voice that says “I’m right, and you’re too stupid to know that”.

Dean and I didn’t get to go into town every day, or even every other day. Dad generally did most of the heavy labor around the farm, but we still had our duties especially during the harvest. We gathered the eggs, cleaned the henhouse, fed the animals and fixed their stables, tended the herb garden and the flowers growing over our mother’s grave, which had been dug at the foot of a hill past the big barn. In the fall we worked for weeks pulling our crops from the field and in the spring we prepared the dirt for another round of seeds. We milked the cow and raised the piglets.

With our help Dad managed a decent living in the twenties, but that was in part because of our close community. Ellen was sometimes willing to fudge a dollar or two on groceries because she liked us, and Mr Mansfield exchanged a few cases of liquor for a bit of our wheat every so often. With so many other farmers in the area, we could trade parts of our crop for what we didn’t grow.

Although we could barter for when we needed something immediately, Dad collected most of his profit when he made the annual trip to the big city. It was a really big event; a lot of the other farmers would go with him sometimes and they would spend weeks preparing their hauls. Our town had no market, but the big city did so eventually they all went to sell in bulk. During the weeks he was gone on his journey, Dean controlled the farm and though we had orders to manage our tasks, we spent most of those days in town with our friends. On more than one occasion we’d forget to bring the eggs in one day or to clean the pigpen, but if Dad ever noticed when he got home he never said a word. I think he was happy that we got to have fun.

The year I turned ten, 1929, two very important things happened. First, America fell into the most extreme economic slump in history as those fantastic twenties proved to have more cloud than silver lining and the stock market returned to its actual value—worthless. Now, times had already been difficult for my family and those around us because farms didn’t prosper as the city folk did. But we could get by.

This was different. On that fateful day Dean came home from a run into town with a newspaper tucked into the bundle of groceries he held under one arm and breezed past me in the kitchen. He dumped his load on the table and told me to put things away before dashing out to the field with the gray roll clutched in one fist. He didn’t return for a while, so I went out to look for him but after my initial search proved fruitless and the sun began to dip to the band that would around where the sky touched down I decided to do my chores and leave him. He was sixteen; he could take care of himself.

I filled Husky’s stall with fresh hay and threw a bucket of slop to the pigs Hester and Jester, and herded Bess to her stall for the night, grinning as she picked my arm and made a soft low sound. I liked Bess a lot, because she seemed very motherly. I liked motherly things.

As I trudged up to the house, I heard the low voices of my family. Dean’s tones had changed that year—his boyish pitch had dropped to the husky voice of a man, matching Dad’s baritone. He changed a lot that year, actually.

I opened the back door and stepped inside.

“And where have you been, Sam?” My father turned to me and asked. His eyes were dark as he looked at the paper lying on the table and the bands of muscle in his arms were clenched.

My eyes narrowed slightly. Dad was really great, but I hated how he attacked me sometimes. Like I was a bad kid. “I was out hauling feed for the animals,” I told him as I passed Dean and sat at my place at the table.

He frowned at me and his gaze shifted to my hands. I folded them, as if he couldn’t see the dirt and grime when my fingers were hidden. “You better straighten up, kid. Those animals need to be fed before the sun goes down, do you hear me? No more of this lazy attitude.” he spat. “They can’t get up and get their own food so they need you to do it for them.”

Dean shuffled forward a little. “No, Dad, it was my fault he didn’t feed them early—when I came home I told him to unload the groceries to I could show you the paper. That’s why he was late,“ he insisted, his green eyes wide with an earnest insistence.

Dad sighed sharply and flicked at the newspaper before turning to the cupboards behind him and pulling out a bottle of dark liquor and a glass. “You boys _get_ -“

And so we did.

Dean and I shared a bedroom in our little house and we hurried to it, our feet thumping on the worn wooden floor as we made our way down the hall. I heard the bubbling of liquid poured into a glass, and he shut the door softly, as if that could block out our father’s drinking.

We finished the harvest in the second week of November and Dad packed up for his trip to the big city. We filled bins and tied bundles, wrapped soft fruits and gourds in sheets of cheep wool, made a makeshift pen for the two pigs we’d raised that year. Both Dad and Dean were reserved and kept to themselves, and I didn’t quite understand why—I’d looked at the newspaper. The headline proclaimed the stocks had crashed, but I didn’t know what that meant.

He left for the city as soon as we had hauled, sorted, and packed what we could spare of the harvest. He would sell as much of it as he could on the market and use the money to replace part of the old plow, and buy a new axe blade, and things like that. A bit would be stored for emergencies, and a bit would go to our allowances. I don’t remember exactly when he departed—it was around midday, and I was spending my time in the big barn.

When I wandered back to the house, my shadow creeping out behind me as the sun drifted to rest on the great bowl of the horizon, Dean met me on the back porch.

“Dad’s gone,” he said, wrinkling his nose at the smell of goat clinging to my worn flannel shirt.

I dipped my head in acknowledgement. “I know,”

“Said to be good. And to tell you he loves you.”

A soft smile formed on my mouth. “Okay,” I replied, stepping past him and opening the rickety door. He followed me inside and poured a glass of water as he leaned against the counter and eyed me speculatively.

It was nice to hear kind words from my father; he wasn’t a malicious parent per se, but sometimes his words were harsh and his expectations demanding. He placed a lot on our shoulders very early, and even as a child I sometimes thought I saw Dean’s bending from the weight. Still, he always made sure to leave a gentle phrase in, especially when he left. It was good. It was a welcome change, and made even more so by the fact that I never heard a single word from my father again.

The days after his departure stretched lazily like a cat in the sun. We were lax with our chores, and we went to town often.

A man arrived at our door one afternoon some weeks later and he brought with him a coffin and the end of our childhood. He was dressed, surprisingly, all in black and he was sweating in the dusky Oklahoma heat. His eyes were strange in color—not golden or tawny, but yellow as a buttercup.

Dean opened the door for him and the sun shining boldly threw his shadow into the house. Behind him was a car—long, black, and with those infamous silver bars affixed to the sides. Beside the hearse stood another man, taller and thinner than the one on our porch, but also dressed darkly.

“Is this the, uh, Winchester residence?” the man asked in a twanging drawl as he unfolded a thing slip of paper from his pocket. I drew back behind my brother into the cool darkness of the house.

“Yessir,” Dean replied.

He jerked one thumb in the direction of the car. “We got your pa, kid. Croaked a couple days back.”

It was very quiet.

“What?” Dean asked, stepping forward. His voice cut our like a whip, low and threatening.

“Your pa’s in the back; go take a look if you don’t believe me.”

My brother glared at the man as he strode to the hearse, but I kept my eyes on the ground as I passed him. The car’s guardian stepped out of his way and allowed Dean to open it and lift the lid of the wooden coffin it held.

“No,” he breathed.

I peered in from behind him.

There he was. His soft dark hair fell gently to one side and his eyes were shut—he could have been sleeping. Cliché, yes, but still true. He had a slight beard and his clothes were wrinkled. There was a hint of alcohol curling about, mixing with the fresh smell of the wood.

His chest was still.

“Drank himself to death, we think. Found him outside the bar.” The man said. He pulled two more things from his pocket and handed one of them to my brother. The other, a think envelope, he kept.

“We found that on him. Journal, looks like.”

Dean stared at it, then nodded numbly. Dad always carried a journal.

“This too. Now,” he began, opening the envelope, “we took possession of his car to help pay for the cost of the coffin, but we need a bit more...” He withdrew several bills and tucked them away. Dean’s hands surged out to snatch it, and the man gripped tight.

“You can’t take that—it’s all we have!” he cried, and for a moment the envelope was pulled into a precarious game of tug of war. The man growled as it was wrestled away from him, and he moved to take it back.

“Boy, you’re lucky we aren’t taking all of it!” he snarled. “Show some respect.”

“Respect _this!_ ” Dean spat, slamming his fist into the man’s jaw. He reeled back and fell into the dust with a curse.

As he hauled himself up he released another string of expletives and drew himself up as if to return the blow, but his partner stopped him. The taller man had crept close with the silence of a creature of the night, and towered above, resting one bony hand on his shoulder.

I had originally thought that the yellow eyed man at our door was the boss of the two, but something about how he paused at the other’s touch made me believe that perhaps that was not so; there was fear in his face as he looked up to meet the eyes of this partner.

His influence was subtle. There was something about this thin man that seemed unearthly, whether it was his skull-like face or his piercing dark eyes or the thinnest scent blowing off of his clothing. The smell of things in the ground, or of drying flowers. He had a cane in one hand, and a pale ring gripped one of his fingers.

He was cold, the aching cold that a man felt right before he froze. He was the dark of the last candle snuffing out, and the rage and heat hidden deep inside the belly of the earth and the bite of icy steel.

He seemed like an angel of death.

“Peace, Azazel,” he murmured in a low, commanding voice. Asazel’s eyes rolled, but he complied. They pulled the pale wooden coffin out of the hearse and left it on our front porch before driving away. Just before they departed, Death turned to me and fixed me with a stern gaze—his eyes were fathomless.

“You behave, child.” He intoned. “Lest we return.”

I said nothing and backed into the house. He stood for a long moment, and then climbed into the passenger seat.

The house was silent for a very long while after they drove away.

Dean shut himself in our room, and I was left to wander the house alone. I knew not to bother him when he was upset, and to be honest I for once didn’t want to talk. I was usually the one who thought we should express our feelings. Not tonight.

I left the house and wandered the empty fields as the sun gave way to a low, pale twilight. It was getting colder at night, and the longs tracts of dirt held tall dark shadows that dragged into the night as it drew closer. I watched the stars begin to drift into the vast sea of blue-black before my bare feet ached enough to send thoughts of returning to my head, but I didn’t want to brave the house. I didn’t want to see Dean.

I crawled into the barn with Bess and spent the night curled in the hay against her side.

I walked to Bobby’s house the next morning. I must have looked pretty strange as I stood hunched on his doorstep—my hair mussed, my clothing dirty, straw and the smell of animal clinging to me—but he was Dad’s best friend and the only one I trusted to tell.

He helped us move the coffin and dig a grave at the foot of the hill next to the thin white cross marking where my mother was buried. It was hard to do, but not because of the rough handled shovels or the muscles aching in my back or the blisters on my hands.

It hurt to put my father in the ground because he was my father and as much as we’d been at odds I loved him. I lived for the gentle pat, of the feel of his hand on my hair, for the soft look in his eyes and the kind word from his lips. Sure, it only happened once or twice, but it was enough.

Dean didn’t speak during the entire process; he just grunted and shoved soil like the rest of us. Somehow Ellen caught wind of it and she came by with some sort of casserole. I’m not sure why people bring casseroles. It’s not like anyone likes them. Dean fed it to the pigs the moment she left.

He didn’t speak again for three more days, and I let him be. I cleaned the house, managed both of our chores. There were things to be done, but at least it wasn’t spring yet. There was lots of work in the spring.

Bobby came by often those first weeks, but gradually he visited less and less. My brother remained stoic, but eventually he shook himself out of his silence and picked up the slack around the farm. It came to a point where he was up and working in the field before I was awake, and he returned late in the evenings. I noticed bottles left out on the counter, and it made me incredibly sad. He was only sixteen, and I ten. I wasn’t sure it we were going to make it.

That Christmas was strange. We’d never had enough money to go all out, but this year we had almost nothing, not even a decent tree. Dean handed me two packages wrapped in newsprint, and I gave him a small golden amulet Bobby had found for me. It was simple, and surprisingly nice.

A few days after that we talked about our plans for the future. Neither of us knew if we could do it, if we could run the farm by ourselves. Bobby would help, and Ellen too—they already did help us out a lot. But we would be doing the work that strained three with just to two of us. It wasn’t like we had any real choice though.

All we could do was shoulder the burden and carry on.


End file.
